Mies Missing Materiality
The artistic intervention will turn the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion into a life-size mock-up and clad it with the same white material all over.
On 8 November, the Pavilion will start to lose its materiality and gradually transform.
On 16 November the intervention will open to the public, with the Pavilion completely white. At 1.30 pm, there will be a round table discussion with the project creators Anna and Eugeni Bach and the architects María Langarita and Carlos Quintáns based on the reflections of Juhani Pallasmaa.
On 27 November, the intervention will close with a disassembly process.
Fundació Mies van der Rohe periodically invites artists and architects to provoke new perspectives and thought through their interventions in the Pavilion, enhancing it as a space of inspiration and experimentation for the most innovative artistic and architectural production. Following SANAA, Jeff Wall, Ai Wei Wei, Enric Miralles, Andrés Jaque, Antoni Muntadas and others, this year the architects Anna and Eugeni Bach will take charge of transforming the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion with their project “mies missing materiality”.
The project turns the Pavilion into a mock-up, with all the surfaces clad with the same white material that shows the representative role of both the original work and its reconstruction. For 11 days, the Pavilion will turn into a 1:1 scale model of the longest-standing temporary pavilion in modern architecture.
The renowned architect and academic Juhani Pallasmaa defined the intervention as “an extraordinary proposal that will evoke a lot of conversation: an exceptionally rich project in associations, memories, references and cross-references”.
On 8 November, the Pavilion will begin to lose its materiality and gradually turn into a mock-up through an assembly performance involving the placement of white vinyl. From a platform located on the Pavilion’s esplanade, visitors can watch the transformation process, which will culminate on 16 November, when it will be open to the public, completely in white. At 1.30 pm, the architects Anna and Eugeni Bach will talk about the importance of materiality with María Langarita (winner of the Emerging Architect special mention of the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award 2013) and Carlos Quintáns (winner of a Golden Lion in the Biennale di Venezia 2016) at a round table discussion open to all.
On 27 November, the intervention will close by removing the white vinyl that will have covered the Mies van der Rohe for a few days, restoring the materiality that belongs to it.
